The tribal premise underlies today’s political economy. That premise is
shared by the enemies and the champions of capitalism alike; it provides the
former with a certain inner consistency, and disarms the latter by a subtle,
yet devastating aura of moral hypocrisy—as witness, their attempts to justify
capitalism on the ground of “the common good” or “service to the consumer” or
“the best allocation of resources.” (Whose resources?)

If capitalism is to be understood, it is this tribal premise that
has to be checked—and challenged.

Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush. The entity involved
in production and trade is man. It is with the study of man—not of
the loose aggregate known as a “community”—that any science of the humanities
has to begin.

Political economists—including the advocates of capitalism—defined their
science as the study of the management or direction or organization or
manipulation of a “community’s” or a nation’s “resources.” The nature of these
“resources” was not defined; their communal ownership was taken for
granted—and the goal of political economy was assumed to be the study of how
to utilize these “resources” for “the common good.”

The fact that the principal “resource” involved was man himself, that he was
an entity of a specific nature with specific capacities and requirements, was
given the most superficial attention, if any. Man was regarded simply as one of
the factors of production, along with land, forests, or mines—as one of the
less significant factors, since more study was devoted to the influence and
quality of these others than to his role or quality.

Political economy was, in effect, a science starting in midstream: it
observed that men were producing and trading, it took for granted that they had
always done so and always would—it accepted this fact as the given, requiring
no further consideration—and it addressed itself to the problem of how to
devise the best way for the “community” to dispose of human effort.

A great deal may be learned about society by studying man; but this process
cannot be reversed: nothing can be learned about man by studying society—by
studying the inter-relationships of entities one has never identified or
defined. Yet that is the methodology adopted by most political economists.
Their attitude, in effect, amounts to the unstated, implicit postulate: “Man is
that which fits economic equations.” Since he obviously does not, this leads to
the curious fact that in spite of the practical nature of their science,
political economists are oddly unable to relate their abstractions to the
concretes of actual existence.